


Occupational Hazard

by monstergabe (aproposity)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hysterical Blindness, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 08:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8136701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aproposity/pseuds/monstergabe
Summary: Jack is rendered temporarily deaf and blind after an early skirmish in the Omnic War. Angela and Gabriel strive to keep it under wraps.





	

It's 3am when the tiny slip of a nurse asks him to leave.

Gabriel takes a swig of his coffee, the sixth he's had in half as many hours, and makes absolutely no effort to move. “Lady, if you want me outta here it'll have to be by force, and I'm pretty sure I could lift two of you with one hand.”

The petrified look she gives him is a bit excessive, but it has her scurrying off back down the corridor she came from and no longer wasting both their time, so Gabriel can't feel too bad.

He doesn't even really blame her for it. After Angela had chewed him out for scaring her people into thinking he was a patient gone walkabout he'd made attempts to wash the blood and dirt off himself, but the hospital's bathrooms are ill-prepared for a battlefield's worth of grime and the complimentary bottles of antibacterial handwash could only do so much. He looks like hell, and that's before taking into account the wild-eyed look that lingers on all soldiers a few hours after being lit up by omnics, himself no exception. It's no wonder he's being treated like a caged wolf.

As for the nagging, well. It was simply her turn.

The coffee lasts barely another mouthful, the paper cups too damn small considering they seem to be utilized mostly by overworked nurses and the squadmates of ER patients who're barely fit for duty themselves. Gabriel would swear blind that he's neither of those things, all too aware that loitering in the hospital's many corridors is the only way he can safely avoid the demands for an after-action report without punishment. Battalion will want every detail of the past twenty-four hour shitshow, right down to every time a private wandered off to piss, and just the thought of sitting in front of a screen makes the pressure build behind his eyes.

It's not the reason he would fight tooth and nail if anyone were to seriously try to remove him, but Gabriel isn't swearing on a Bible over it.

Back to the paper cup. Eyeing it, he briefly considers making the trek back to the coffee machine in the lobby, then thinks better of it. The caffeine really isn't doing anything for his migraine. The opposite wall has become his best friend, and while it had started off blisteringly white it now bears a strange mess of black lines that shudder and jump like comm static every time he blinks. He scrubs a hand over his face, grinds his fingers and thumb into his temples. There's a lingering buzz of tinnitus that hassles him like the neon lights lining the garrison town's beachfront, and when he closes his eyes the flashing lights in the dark resemble the firecracker snap of enemy fire.

Being pulled off the line always leaves Gabriel strangely disoriented, out of time and out of place. Command isn't in the habit of rotating units when it comes to the SEP, but when the order is given it's carried out with the quick efficiency of an IV drip being changed. There's no choice but to ride it out; asking for pills when he's not on his deathbed would probably get him landed with a psych eval before the night is out. Squint, and SEP headquarters is the drug store in downtown LA.

He hangs onto the paper cup, just in case.

When he drops his hand from his face it's to consider that the only two blondes Gabriel can claim to know well are both unrelated and of entirely different nationalities, yet it's uncanny how they both look the same when they're chomping at the bit to chew him out. And they say redheads are the ones with the fire in their veins.

“I really would prefer it if you didn't harass my staff,” Angela snaps by way of hello. Her glasses sit far down on her nose, a tell-tale sign she's spent an evening bowed over the medical records of fresh inpatients.

“I was polite.” He shrugs. “If you call that abuse I don't know how your staff cope with the way the men mouth off when they're injured.”

“The men have an excuse,” she tells him sharply. “You, on the other hand, do not.”

So it's like that. Mouthing off to Angela is like kicking a hornet's nest: sometimes you get away with it, and sometimes you get stung by a swarm of fucking hornets. Tonight, when she is holding half his men together with a combination of nano-tech and her own damn surgical skill, he has no place to bitch at her about the merits of her staff and he knows it. He drops his shoulders and his shitty attitude and tries to look suitably chastised. “Angela, no one's told me shit. You really surprised I'm climbing the walls here?”

She scoffs at him, shakes her head, but she's not calling security or his CO and that's something. On nights like this, Angela wouldn't so much as piss on him if he turned up in her waiting room on fire. Maybe that's luck. Or maybe it's a very, very bad sign.

“So what's wrong with him exactly?” Gabriel ventures, because he's been deployed to the front line too many times to believe in luck.

“We don't know.”

The paper cup crumples into a damp mess in his fist. He starts down the hall, gets one foot in front of him before Angela's hand thumps against his chest. He knocks it away a touch too forcefully but stops in his tracks all the same.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means 'we don't know'. Would you like me to translate it into your native tongue?” Angela tells him, all cold sarcasm and spite, and all he can do is sneer back at her.

The look on her face says that she's on the cusp of kicking him out.  _Just let her try_ , he thinks.  _Just let her try._

“Hysterical blindness,” she offers instead, then at his blank look: “He's adamant that he can't see. His eyes refuse to focus, on moving objects or otherwise. But his cornea reacts to light just as well as yours or mine, and any damage to the eye itself is minimal.” 

“So he's lying.” A beat. “He wouldn't lie. If he wasn't injured he'd still be in the fight right now.”

“We don't think he's lying.” Angela starts to walk down the corridor, and something leaps in his chest when he realises that she means for him to follow. “But if we take the facts as they are it can only mean his injuries are psychological in nature.”

“You sayin' Jack's loco?”

“I'm _saying_ Jack sustained a trauma. From your mission report, he's lucky not to have had his arm and leg blown off.” She's not wrong on that front. Gabriel had front row seats to Jack leaping from behind cover and charging into the fray. Stupid bastard thought he'd seen movement in the rubble. _A civilian,_ he'd hollered right before he'd thrown his gun down and vaulted the blown-out bus shielding them from the omnic assault, completely ignoring Gabriel's frantic yelling to _get the fuck back here, Morrison, before you get your balls blown off – that's an order!_

Gabriel had gone to check it out for himself once the casevac birds had stepped off and their auxiliary unit had deployed with the necessary firepower to push the omnics on the retreat. Yeah, a civilian alright. Just another body in the rubble.

Angela grabs his arm, breaking his reverie and forcing him to look at her. She speaks slowly and carefully, her eyes hard, and he is cripplingly aware that if there is one thing she wants to get through his thick skull tonight, it's this: “Gabriel, you must understand. I can treat a man missing an arm and leg. Hysterical blindness is a conversion disorder.”

“A disorder,” he echoes, voice flat.

“I'm keeping it off the books for as long as I can, but you know as well as I do that you didn't bring him in five minutes ago. It's been hours. People are starting to request an update on his status, and if the _wrong_ people decide Jack's a liability and take him off the front line then he really will go _'loco'_ , as you say.”

Gabriel is good at reading between the lines of Angela's diplomacy. Bottom line: Jack needs to get his shit together and pronto, or he can kiss goodbye to his command position for good. The top brass aren't about to leave him entirely out in the cold, Gabriel knows – a desk job if he recovers, a medal and a one-way ticket back to Indiana if he doesn't. One stupid fucking move and the career of the only co-commander he can stand to work with is on the verge of collapse. Mierda.

“I'm sure you know that ordinarily I wouldn't allow this,” Angela says as she draws to a standstill outside a private room, the holograph by the door displaying what Gabriel instantly recognizes as Jack's serial number, “but the blast affected his hearing, too. That one we _can_ verify; it'll return in a few hours. He was in a lot of distress when he arrived. Ideally he can't be left to his own devices in his condition, and I have other patients to attend.” She looks down her nose at him, a great feat when she sits a head shorter. “Perhaps you can be of some use, since you won't be leaving here any time soon no matter where I put you.”

“Thank you, Angela,” he says, uncharacteristically sincere as far as she's concerned.

“You will not make this a habit,” she tells him firmly. “I will not have you getting in the way of my staff trying to do their job over something more trivial than this in the future.”

“Of course.”

“From _either_ of you.”

“Sí, doctora.”

From the look she gives him it doesn't appear that she believes him very much. She lifts her hand to the door's scanner, and about the same time its blue interface turns to green, Gabriel realises his hands are shaking.

He tells himself to lay off the caffeine. It's not the reason his hands are shaking.

Here's the thing about Jack: he is not, nor has he ever been, a wilting flower. Working the land had filled him out long before the SEP had ever got near him and the rigorous training regime they'd undergone had kept him in good shape; as far as Gabriel can recall he'd never missed a PT class. It's a shock to the system, then, to see him swathed in crisp white medical sheets and looking smaller than Gabriel has ever seen him. Someone had made a similar effort to clean Jack up as Gabriel had done to himself, and had presumably given up once they'd realised there were no significant wounds under all the blood. The right side of his face is stained in a long, red-brown smear, all the way down to his collarbone. It makes what unblemished skin he  _can_ see look startlingly pale.

The last time Gabriel had seen him he'd seemed strangely unreal: swept off his feet by the blast, he'd resembled too much the repurposed crash test dummies in the demonstrations they'd attended warning against doing just the kind of stupid shit Jack had tried to pull. His body had the same limp heaviness to it when Gabriel had dragged him back behind their lines, arms looped around his shoulders and roaring at him. That wasn't what had shaken Gabriel.

It was how  _quiet_ he had been. Men caught in an explosion, missing their legs, their arms, their balls – they screamed, they cried, they babbled inanely about broken promises and their doting, absent mothers. Jack hadn't done any of those things. Instead, he'd gulped in quick, trembling gasps of air like a fish on dry land, eyes wide and face tipped to the sky. He'd stayed like that – trembling and quiet – back pressed to Gabriel's front, even as Gabriel snarled over his stupid blonde head to the nearest dumbfounded private to stop gawking and call in a fucking casevac, mindful of nothing except Jack's fingers clutching tight at the sleeve of his ODs.

By the time the bird's fan blades caught the air, the same private was standing in front of him trying to explain that the reason he'd hesitated wasn't because he was too much of a dumb shit to make his own damn decisions, but because to anyone else Jack didn't even look like he'd needed a casevac. The same time that Gabriel had the bone-deep realisation that he was a fucking coward, because if Jack had been lying with a gaping wound in his chest Gabriel wouldn't have known, couldn't have known, would have rather let Jack bleed out in his arms than look down to see his guts spilling out of his body.

There is no wound though, and Jack is here, and as small as he seems, his hair a mess and speckled with shrapnel, he looks sleeping, not dead. He looks  _real_ .

“You look like shit.”

Predictably, there is no response at all. Gabriel crosses the room and takes a seat in the lonely chair next to the bed, watching the measured rise and fall of Jack's chest. No wires, no heart monitor, not even the sterile hum of nanites at work. He could be sleeping; without thinking, Gabriel takes his hand.

Jack's whole body flinches away from him, then relaxes.

“Gabriel,” he breathes, one long, slow exhale, eyes drifting open in a thousand-yard stare through the far wall, and Gabriel realises that just because he's in a hospital bed doesn't mean he's got any more rest than Gabriel has. Jack sounds more exhausted than he's ever heard him; more than week-long training exercises and stealth missions out in the field.

“Fuckin' idiot,” he mutters back, squeezing Jack's hand once. One for yes, two for no. It's what they've been taught in this situation, and nowhere near enough for the conversation they need to have. It leaves Gabriel strangely impotent where he'd otherwise be spitting fire, and so the quiet persists. 

Jack tips his head back, eyes on the ceiling now, and Gabriel wonders what he must think of him being here, hiding from their superiors and holding his hand. If Jack had been in any real danger – if he were on his deathbed – Angela would have called. It would be imperative for Gabriel, as Jack's immediate co-commander, to know. There was no reason for Gabriel to be here.

There was every reason.

“I'm surprised you haven't beat my ass already.” Jack's eyes are soft and warm where they're pinned to the wall a little past Gabriel's left shoulder.

“I ain't in the habit of beating on the blind,” Gabriel says, and Jack doesn't even so much as blink. Blind. It's not a label he would even put in the same ballpark as Jack, sharp-eyed on the firing range as he is. Jack could call out targets Gabriel hadn't even known were there. A blind Jack Morrison is like the punchline to a real shitty joke.

Jack's free hand crosses over his body, bumping at the inside of Gabriel's wrist with a searching touch. It drifts up his arm, along the curl of his shoulder until it reaches his face, fingers catching on scrapes and dried blood and eventually tucking themselves underneath the hem of his beanie. His jaw fits snugly in Jack's palm, urging him closer, until their foreheads are pressed together. Their bodies gravitate slowly towards each other, as synchronized here as they are on the battlefield. Gabriel's own hand curls around Jack's side, palm pressed flat to his ribs, keeping him close.

With Gabriel's eyes closed, Jack's smile is heard rather than seen. “Damn, Gabe, it's a good thing that animal died in your mouth on the way over here. For a second there I was worried I mighta been holding hands with a cute nurse instead.”

“Estúpido,” Gabriel replies, and butts their noses together in retaliation.

It's good to be close to Jack, to be near him. The simplicity of it is a luxury when there is seldom privacy on the base for either of them. Those moments they  _can_ snatch primarily involve strategic planning or, more recently, the frenzied trysts in each other's dorms where they worked out some of the war's tension on each other. That in itself had proven more complex than Gabriel had expected. It wasn't a surprise; some soldiers fight, some fuck. Fucking each other was convenient, exactly their kind of frank efficiency. There should have been no place for tenderness.

Then again, Jack has a habit of surprising him.

Jack's breath rattles abruptly in the space between them right before he coughs brick dust. Gabriel opens his eyes to see Jack's, already open, too close and a struggle to focus. He seems so far away, looking straight through him. 

“I'm fuckin' scared, Gabe,” he confesses in the quiet, his voice perfectly steady.

Selfishly, Gabriel is glad of Jack's temporary deafness, because he has no fucking clue what to say to that. Instead, he squeezes one long, drawn-out  _yes,_ presses it against his skin. He pulls away just far enough to angle his head up and press his lips to Jack's forehead. 

It's far from perfect. This close he stinks of blood, the sharp taste of munitions and antiseptic chasing its way into Gabriel's mouth, and Gabriel's beard must scratch but Jack doesn't complain, twisting under the covers so he can press closer. Jack's fingers are tight around his own, his thumb working back and forth against the heel of his palm as if Gabriel is the one who's afraid. Maybe he is. Maybe it's not for Jack's benefit at all that he kisses his forehead again, then his temple.

He's never kissed Jack before. Gabriel thinks he could get used to it.

Jack is a special case, and it's not just because he occasionally likes putting Gabriel's dick in his mouth. He's  _good_ at what he does, and has the rare quality of not allowing the bureaucracy to fuck with his competence in the field.  Gabriel wonders what he would do if command gets taken from Jack. He doesn't exactly make it a secret that he can't stand the majority of his co-commanders. Cowards, ladder-climbers and kiss-asses the lot of them.  There's no one else's rifle Gabriel would rather have at his six.

He doesn't bother to say any of this aloud. Instead, he kisses the corner of Jack's mouth, catches the soft noise Jack makes between his lips and tucks it under his tongue, and accepts that he is and will always be unforgivably selfish.

When he slumps back in his chair, Jack's eyes are closed, and the blush sitting high on his cheekbones at stark contrast to the dark hollows under his eyes. The look on his face is one Gabriel has never seen before, his mouth oddly slack. The tip of his tongue touches the corner of his mouth, pink and wet, and heat scorches low in Gabriel's belly when he realises Jack wants him to kiss him again, and a different kind of fear chokes him into inaction. 

“You don't gotta be scared,” Gabriel says lamely, his voice rough as razorblades in the silence while what he wants to say is _yes let me kiss you let me –_

But not here. Not in a hospital bed reeking of sterilizing fluid and rotting meat. Jack understands, presses his lips together in a thin line; it's why they work well together, this silent communication that passes between them. Jack settles back under the covers, blonde head sinking back against the pillows. Gradually, his hand goes slack in Gabriel's grip. Occasionally, his eyes rove under their lids, still looking for targets; civilians.

“You got this, Morrison,” he tells the room. “You got this.”

In the morning, Angela chases Gabriel out of Jack's room with just enough fire to make the higher ups standing in the doorway believe that she hadn't given him any invitation to stay whatsoever, but not quickly enough that he doesn't get to see Jack wake during all the commotion. His eyes are clear and focused, staring at Gabriel as if he's seeing him for the first time, still caked as he is in blood and dirt and the fear of losing Jack. For that, Gabriel thinks that being stuck with latrine duty for the next month is worth it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [komodobits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits) for offering her beta assistance when my writer brain stalled for this fic at the eleventh hour. She is long suffering and too good to me.
> 
> Hysterical blindness is otherwise known as conversion disorder, in which a psychological stressor or trauma can affect the senses or motor skills with no obvious medical explanation. Treatment for CD is fairly rudimentary: remove the patient from the vicinity of the stressor and explain clearly and logically what is happening to them. I'd like to go on the record as saying that Jack's recovery is due to this, and not Gabriel's Magical Healing Smooches(tm). Thanks for reading!
> 
>  
> 
> [Follow me on Tumblr](http://monstergabe.tumblr.com/)


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